The Cuban National Library after 1959: Shaping Literary Culture and the
Abstract
This essay traces the history of the Cuban National Library, La Biblioteca Nacional José Martí (BNJM) and the system of satellite libraries that it implemented in the Cuban provinces. These provincial libraries were meant to facilitate the literacy campaign, but also to allow cultural idioms that the provinces felt represented their own culture to be collected and shared with the National Library and with city dwellers as part of a new collective national consciousness promoted by the Castro government. The essay asks how the provinces could authentically represent their mostly rural culture to people in Havana as something other than archetype, myth, or kitsch, and to a national institution that was once known in part for high-brow culture -- the BNJM. The piece examines what criteria and methodologies were used by the provincial, or satellite, libraries to choose and collect their cultural artifacts.